


Consigned to Dust

by orchid314



Series: Four Vignettes [1]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Gen, Memories, Poetry, Second Anglo-Afghan War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 06:56:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14159262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orchid314/pseuds/orchid314
Summary: John Watson reminisces about his time in Afghanistan.





	Consigned to Dust

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rachelindeed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rachelindeed/gifts).



> A little thank-you to rachelindeed for being such a supportive friend in the great adventure of writing.

The case had brought them to a standstill. Watson and Holmes had spent the entire day in a fierce study of the evidence but, as night approached, they had made little headway. Holmes was currently occupied with his pipe, his deft fingers tamping down the wayward shreds of tobacco.

"What did you used to think about as you went into battle?"

"What's that?" Watson paused and looked up from his examination of the heavy files in his lap.

"What would you think of as you were preparing for an action?"

Watson considered. "Why, ensuring that all was ready. That the operating tents were properly installed, and the medicines laid out, and so forth. How much fresh water was on hand. There was never enough of it...That and the morphine, there was never enough morphine either..."

"Well, then, what did you think about in the midst of combat?"

"Oh, you mean was I afraid?" Watson asked archly. He stopped to think. "The first few times your heart pumps with fear, on the eve of an engagement, waiting for it, not knowing how you'll respond in the very hour. But you soon find yourself inured to it. Your mind latches on to sunny things. To enable you to bear it."

Watson chuckled to himself. "I used to imagine myself in a bower of orange trees in blossom, with a dark-haired Spanish damsel feeding me plums," he said, a little sheepishly.

He looked across at his companion, who was grinning at him in undisguised friendship, his face open in a way Watson seldom saw it.

"My dear Watson," he laughed.

"Yes, even so," Watson said, warming to the old memory that was not quite a memory. "With music wafting in from somewhere not too far away, and soft air on your skin, and the Spanish lass singing to you in low tones. Altogether delightful," he said.

"And what did you carry with you? Does not every soldier keep some talisman as protection in the great clashes into which he throws himself?"

Watson's face grew serious.

"Yes, he does, at that. I had with me a silly keepsake that Murray, my orderly, gave me once. A golden earring, which he said would purchase my way to the underworld if I should meet my fate during the course of the fighting."

Watson shook his head slightly to himself, lost in his recollections.

"Murray, I've told you about him before, haven't I? What an utter fool he was," he said fondly. "He looked like a Barbary pirate–we eventually began to suspect he might be one–who had wandered off and somehow found himself in the Godforsaken mountains of Afghanistan, instead of on the high seas, in his element, averting shipwreck. What a great swashbuckling knave he was."

Holmes waited patiently, uncharacteristically placid, and they sat together for a time in comfortable silence. Then Watson frowned, his voice grown quiet.

"My mother's portrait, of course. In one of those little leather cases with a clasp, you know. But the glass protecting it cracked quite soon after I arrived out there, and I couldn't keep the dust from becoming embedded in it."

He looked up to see if Holmes still attended his words and, assured of it, looked down again to the sentences that marched after each other, line by line, in the document staring up at him. He felt a curious twinge pass through his chest, where no apparent wound lay buried.

"What else?" his companion probed gently.

"Behind the portrait, a poem."

"A poem?"

"Yes, you surely must have read it before. I kept it folded and tucked away behind her picture. She had copied it out in her own hand, I believe to comfort herself after my grandfather died. Let's see..." Watson reflected,

"' _...Thou thy worldly task hast done,_  
_Home art gone, and ta'en they wages:_  
_Golden lads and girls all must,_  
_As chimney sweepers, come to dust..._ '"

As Watson continued, his voice gathered weight like a bell, and the shadows thickened beyond the windows, where frost had crept in little tesselated patterns into the corners of the panes.

"' _...Fear no more the frown o' the great;_  
_Thou art past the tyrant's stroke;_  
_Care no more to clothe and eat;_  
_To thee the reed is as the oak:_  
_The scepter, learning, physic, must_  
_All follow this, and come to dust._ '"

The fire had now deepened and its heat reached both men. Watson could feel it through the legs of his trousers. The flames cracked and snapped as if they had brought the wild wood into the room. Or perhaps they had brought back to him one of those old campfires, when he and the other men had bivouacked on a vast plain under the high stars, the emptiness so immense that one could hear the flap of a solitary owl's wings on a moonless night.

"Well, that got me through the worst of it," he said. 

Watson thought that Holmes must be caught up in some reverie of his own, for he did not reply at once.

"' _Quiet consummation have, and renownèd be thy grave_ '...Thank you," Holmes finally remarked.

"I'm sorry?"

"I see it a little more clearly now, whereas before I could only ever imagine it. What the war must have been like for you. A generous gift to have shared with me."

"Oh."

Another silence fell about them.

"Did you ever have it repaired, the portrait?"

"What? Oh, no, it was lost in the retreat from Maiwand or sometime after the arrival of our rag-tag band in Candahar. The golden earring too, alas. I was quite bitter about it for a good while afterwards, but now–it's all lodged here in my mind. One of the benefits of war, I suppose. Those long hours of waiting teach one to burn things into the memory. They never really leave you after that."

Watson was surprised at how far afield he had let himself be carried by the mood of retrospection. He couldn't think quite how he had got there. Holmes gave a little cough and recrossed his legs, his clear eyes carefully appraising Watson. He gestured with his pipe towards the papers they had been examining together. 

"Watson, if you'll just take up that file and be so good as to read aloud again the passage in which the inspector comes across the missing necklace hidden inside the bureau. I haven't yet got a complete sense of the thief's movements on the day after the burglary." 

"Why, certainly."

Holmes leaned deeper into his armchair and directed his eyes to the ceiling above him, as his friend searched for the place in the report at which they had left off earlier. And Watson began to recite other words than those he had recalled just now from the private recesses of his mind, the fire burning pure blue and orange in the familar hearth, as the cold evening lengthened into night.


End file.
